In English

The Vasilopita (VasilOpita) is the main custom in Greece for New year.  It’s one which we encounter throughout Greece, though naturally with local variations. These are mostly to do with the ingredients of the cake. In some places it’s a cake, though there are also parts where it’s a savory or sweet pie, made with phyllo pastry. There even places where it’s a bread. There are also differences in the way the Vasilopita’s decorated.  One common feature, though is that there’s always a cross and a reference to the year. And in all cases, the cake or pie is round and has a coin hidden inside it. Most Greeks cut the Vasilopita  immediately after the turn of the year. In some ...

Let’s not seek Elders who have foresight or far-sight, but, above all, let them be humble and capable of the cure of our infirmities. This will appear from the manner of their life and the place and condition of their asceticism.

Recently, the industrial company ‘World Ltd’ bought from the Japanese firm ‘Sora’, the latest electronic machinery, ‘with cutting-edge technology’. Japanese engineers assembled it and gave it a test work-out. At the same time, they trained the operator. The inauguration of the new machine started with a formal ceremony. The whole of the Board of Management of the company was present. ‘We must be very proud’, said the CEO with great satisfaction, ‘of the company’s new acquisition’. ‘We have nothing like it in our factory’, the Managing Director hastened to add. ‘Sora, which means ‘heaven’ in Japanese, has given us the best it has’. The CEO wasn’t paying attention and stood up to meet the priest who was coming in, cutting off the Managing ...

Once, when a discussion was taking place between Jewish Sadducees, Pharisees and Hellenists on the subject of Our Lord Jesus Christ, some saying He was a prophet, others that He was deluded, and yet others that He was the Son of God, the blessed First Martyr and Archdeacon Stephen went and stood on a high place and preached to everyone concerning Our Lord Jesus Christ. “My brethren, why have your evils increased so greatly that the whole of Jerusalem is in uproar? Blessed are the people who have never felt any hesitation in their hearts concerning Jesus Christ. For it was He Who bent the heavens and came down for our sins and was born from the Holy Virgin, the ...

  The Bible and early post-Biblical Christian literature opposes slaveholding by Christians in the 21st-century world, although for a reason you probably did not expect.  This article reconciles Biblical acceptance of slavery with modern-day Christian opposition to it. As you are aware, the Bible does not condemn slavery.  In fact, there are passages that condone it: Exodus 21.2-4, Exodus 21.6f, Exodus 21.32, 1 Corinthians 7.21, Colossians 3.22f, Colossians 4.1, 1 Peter 2.18, and the Epistle to Philemon.  Colossians 3.22 even instructs slaves to work diligently for their Christian masters.  Much of the material on employer-employee relations in the Bible pertains to owners and slaves. In the post-Biblical literature we have the Epistle to Polycarp 4.3 (ca AD 107) by Bishop Ignatius of Antioch, ...

Most young people don’t know how to discover their calling in the life. Whether to dedicate themselves to monasticism or select the marriage path. Some have the feeling that monasticism is a more superior choice than marriage and that marriage represents a lower situation. Others believe that any young man who chooses to become a monk is a coward who avoids the responsibilities of citizenship. Bishop of Nafpaktos, Hierotheos provides a warm insight and a clear view of the essence of both marriage and monastic life, based on the teaching of the Eastern Church Fathers. “Both marriage and monasticism are powerful symbolic ways of straining toward the ultimate goal of love. Celibacy and marriage are not contrasted with each other; instead, ...

We hear about wars, earthquakes, catastrophes, tempests, but let’s just wait and the rain will come…

Too often we place our hopes in words and human thinking.  But, can human thought or words ever gain for us what we seek? St Gregory Palamas says, If someone attempts to touch the stars with his hand, even though he is tall and stretched his arm further than the rest, he is almost as far away from those ethereal heights as men of much shorter stature, the difference not being worth mentioning. In the same way, on subjects transcending words, eminent speakers are not significantly better at saying something than anyone else. Who can attempt to treat of matters which utterly defy all words without being seen to give  away beneath the weight of these topics, like those reputed to have ...

According to the Proto-Gospel of James, Righteous Joseph was away for the summer doing construction work while the infant Christ was growing in the womb of Mary. In the autumn, Joseph returned home to find his espoused wife seven months pregnant. The details of this encounter between Joseph and Mary are not recorded in the Scripture.  A few of the Fathers of the Church have attempted to construct a possible dialog between the two, with a frustrated Joseph making accusations and a preachy Mary quoting scripture.  I find such supposed dialogs hard to imagine.  After all, the Gospels say that Mary “treasured these things in her heart,” implying that she was not wont to talk about her spiritual experiences. Also, Her ...

One reason why people today suffer and have weak nervous systems is that they lack the power from above which the Church gives. And if you remember, when Christ ascended into heaven, where were the disciples told to go? To the upper room in Jerusalem, until they were ‘clothed with the power from on high’. It is precisely this power from on high that we must take and which is given freely to us, provided we desire it, provided we want it, provided we work for it and ask for it.

With His incarnation, His humanization, God entered the innermost core of our lives in the most obvious way. He entered our circulatory system, our heart, the centre of everything, the centre of the universe. After He’d been expelled from our world, our body and our soul through our voluntary sin, He returned, through His incarnation, to our world, our body and our soul, becoming completely human and working for us as a human being. He dwells in the world, and from the creation provides for the creation, sanctifying, saving, transforming it. The incarnation of God is the most earth-shattering event and the most radical upheaval on the earthly world and on all other worlds, because through it the wonder of ...

“The word is near you, it is in your mouth and in your heart” (Rm 10:8; Dt 30:14) What strikes us most at Christmas is how our Creator eliminated the distance between himself and us, His creatures. He not only takes upon Himself our nature in order to save us, or speaks to us in order for us to know him and believe in Him, or gives us His body and His blood in order to unite with Him, but also achieves something better. He gives us use of the word, an experience that exclusively characterizes rational beings, enabling us, in turn, also to eliminate the distance to Him through its use. The Word becomes incarnate in our lives, and we ...

Discourse 38 I. Christ is born, glorify Him. Christ is from heaven, receive Him. Christ is on earth, be lifted up; sing to the Lord, all the earth and, joining both in one, I say: Let the heavens rejoice and the earth be glad that He Who is of heaven is now of earth. Christ in the flesh, rejoice with trembling and with joy: with trembling because of your sins, with joy because of your hope. Christ of a Virgin; Women, live as virgins, that you may be mothers of Christ. Who does not worship Him Who has been from the beginning? Who does not glorify Him Who has lately come? II. Again the darkness is dispelled; again Light appears; again ...

Archim. Zacharias Zacharou All the ordinances of the undefiled Church are offered to the world for the sole purpose of dis­covering the ‘deep heart’, the centre of man’s hypo­s­tasis. According to the Holy Scriptures, God has fashioned every heart in a special way, and each heart is His goal, a place wherein He desires to abide that He may mani­fest Himself. Since the kingdom of God is within us, the heart is the battlefield of our salvation, and all ascetic effort is aimed at cleansing it of all filthiness, and preserving it pure before the Lord. ‘Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life’, exhorts Solomon, the wise king of Israel. These paths of life ...

Cemetery One day this winter, I saw a perfect stranger lose his glove. He walked quickly across a busy intersection where I was waiting in my car for the red light to turn green. As he neared the sidewalk on the right side of the intersection, a black glove fell out of his backpack. He didn’t see it fall. He strode briskly up the hill. My mouth opened instinctively, and I had a flashing mental image of myself leaping out of the car to shout to him. “You lost your glove! It’s on the sidewalk behind you! Come back and get it!” Then the light turned green and I drove on, impelled by the cars behind me. But I couldn’t shake my ...

Bare bones convince those who gaze upon them that nothing earthly is ours.

Moses taking of fhis sandals In the earliest years of Christian teaching, dogma was proclaimed only when a denial of something (Jesus’ humanity or his divinity, for example) made it necessary. The articulated doctrine of the Trinity emerged slowly, from the more important domain of silence into the lesser domain of words. Words, even at their best, are inadequate and prone to misunderstanding, leading to concepts and imaginary constructs that can get in the way of participation in the mystery. We need words, but we need them to take us to the place where we realize their inadequacy. They point us in the right direction, but they are never sufficient. In dealing with other religions—or for that matter with serious agnosticism—we should ...

Wednesday, 24 December  2137, the secondary three-man Committee for the Protection of Nature of the International Academy of Sciences was continuing its session. The three esteemed scientific chiefs, who, coincidentally, constituted an informal representation of the three largest races on earth, since one was white, another yellow and a third black, had been called upon to take a final decision on a pioneering proposal. The proposal was framed and submitted by the primary, multi-member Committee of the same Service, and concerned the protection of the Blaniulus Guttulatus worm, which was in danger of extinction for reasons unknown. The report recommended that the new method of wave mutation be applied, by which a person can be transformed into another living species. ...